Facilities manager for a wildlife and heritage charity. I lead a small team looking after health & safety, compliance and building maintenance and repairs.

Ninety percent of my time is spent at the keyboard, but since I am peripatetic and move around the properties that I cover, I have a different, and usually beautiful, view out of the window each day of the week. When I am not sat behind a desk, I will be crawling through an attic or have my head down a sewer or something.

My time is spent arranging contractors for routine servicing or repair projects, reviewing fire risk assessments and dealing with outstanding actions, writing client briefs for renewable energy projects, chasing people to do workplace inspections, advising on risk assessments, updating our compliance tracker, arranging asbestos surveys, ensuring that everyone who needs training has it up to date, proving to utility companies that their meters are wildly inaccurate and need to be replaced, working out why the biomass boiler/sewage treatment plant/water heater/automatic gate/car park machine/phone system/greywater pump/security alarm/whatever isn’t working and getting it fixed and so on.

• A grass snake seems to have taken up residence under our compost heap. Hopefully it will be a suitable hibernation spot.
• New seasons of Star Trek: Lower Decks and Shrinking are out.
• My SO and I went for a good walk in a nearby woodland nature reserve. The autumn colours are really coming though now.
• I now have some cosy fleece pyjamas. I haven’t owned pyjamas for decades, but can see will that they will revolutionise my weekend mornings. I don’t know why I didn’t get some years ago.

Checking the ones that I usually buy the ingredients are:

• Butter

Or, if I go for salted versions:

• Butter
• Salt

Recently went to a screening of the 1922 Nosferatu with a live accompanist creating an improvised soundtrack on violin, piano and waterphone - which was not an instrument that I had not encountered before, but evidently features in the score of The Matrix, Aliens and a range of other films. I can certainly see why - it was extremely atmospheric. I had seen Nosferatu a couple of times before - as well as the 1979 Herzog version, and Shadow of the Vampire (2000) - but this definitely added something new.

By that age, I was into my third long-term job (> 5 years) and had had upwards of 16 short term ones - multiple part time ones at once, or some just for a few weeks or a couple of months here and there between the long-term ones etc.

48 doesn’t seem that unlikely - nor even an indicator that they will not be staying put for any length of time unless your job is a shitty one with a high turnover anyway.

Not quite a scrotum pole, but there is certainly an interpretation of this statue of Cybele where what we are looking at are not multiple breasts, but actually the scrota of her eunuch priesthood.

It’s my turn to cook tonight. I’m doing a shakshuka.

I’d not encountered Bloody Knuckles before, but we did have the card variant when I was at school - the trick being to get a new pack, flex it a little and push the card so that all the edges are available to strike the knuckles in rapid succession. I was extremely good at it, as i recall, both in inflicting and (particularly) withstanding the pain.

We knew this game as Scabby Queen. Evidently there is an actual card game called that, it seems, with the knuckle skinning merely the end result. We did not bother with the game part (or even know about it) - just the knuckle skinning.

• Kaos - I’ve only seen the first ep so far, but it looks to have promise.
• Le Bureau de Legendes - this French spy series has a slow and meandering start but picks up over a couple of episodes and the initial time with the characters pays off.
• Pine Gap - After the first couple of episodes, I’m struggling to care about the characters - and am caring a LOT about the absurd lack of a Faraday cage around the main building which would have prevented the main plot point in the first place. It is only miniseries, but I doubt that we’ll finish it unless it picks up a lot and gives me a reason to get my disbelief suspended again.
• Slow Horses - the third of the spy tales that we are following at the moment and by far the most fun and engaging. Season 4 is as good as ever, and Oldman’s Lamb is wonderful.
• Carol and the End of the World - a low key, introspective little exploration of self-discovery and where you find value and it’s really quite charming.

Doctor who (2005) s01e07 - Kronkburgers on Satellite 5 in the opening scenes.

Excluding pretty much everything that I saw as a kid - when you go into basically everything blind - it would be After Hours (1985). I either hadn’t read anything about it or hadn’t been paying attention. Standing outside the cinema, I just saw that it was by Scorsese and went in.

I still think that it is one of his most under-appreciated films. And I loved the Ted Lasso homage, combining it with the Divine Comedy.

This evening: pizza and a film - Breaking Away (1979)
Tomorrow - gardening, then off to a medieval feast at a local museum
Sunday - probably out for a hike somewhere, then a waterway bat survey in the evening

Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) - Aubrey Plaza in an engaging character piece that has hints of Eagle vs Shark among others. It’s not outstanding by any means and not among Plaza’s best, but still witty and touching.

Way back in the day it used to be Cinema City in Norwich: the only art-house one in the city and where I ‘learnt’ cinema. It was great.

These days, I live between three small town cinemas in Suffolk, and they are all good in their own ways.

The Riverside in Woodbridge often has a talk about the film or maybe even an interview with the director or one of the cast etc on stage afterwards. Aldeburgh Cinema is run by a charity, shows a good few NT live events and local films and also has a documentary fest each year, and Leiston Film Theatre is, as they say on their site, the oldest purpose built cinema in the county (110 years now), and had the advantage for a while of being about 150m from our back gate. It is the most commercial of three in terms of programme, but still has some interesting stuff.

He has been involved to the extent of commenting on the “shortage of dwarves”, but otherwise seemed fairly supportive IIRC.

I am torn. One the one hand I automatically expect it not to be a patch on the original, but on the other, there are several people involved who I enjoy, and I must say that the trailer does seem to have hit the right notes.

I am definitely going to give it a try.

A few things off the top of my head:

• I made a particularly tasty shakshuka over the weekend.
• I saw a stoat leading her kits nose to tail, so that they looked like a single, bounding, furry snake as they crossed the track a few days back. I have only seen stoats doing that twice before in my life.
• in Forge of Empires, which I have recently started playing, my defending PvP army successfully defeated a challenger: the first time that has happened, and it left me feeling ridiculously happy.
• Albert Finney and Sean Connery’ interaction in the 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express
• My partner’s pleasure at completing a 1940s style knitted top. It has turned out extremely well.

I didn’t use to shave - also seeing it as a chore - but as I aged, I found that the upper edge of my beard was creeping up my cheeks to the point where I was beginning to see the upper edge at the bottom of my vision, which I found weird and disconcerting, so ended up trimming the top edge. That looked weird, and so I progressed and eventually settled on a goatee kinda thing, which I have been told by several people suits me - so I stick with it.

I use a wet shave: soapy water, then a shave gel and then shave with the grain. I have never timed it but it takes around the same length of time overall as cleaning my teeth, I suppose. It is reasonably smooth - but not mega-smooth by any means. I do it each morning.

I’m on holiday for a fortnight now. Away with a group of friends at a chalet that one of them owns. Im overlooking the bay, the sea is beautiful and the weather is fine.

Im quite a bit over 30 - late 50s - and we have been doing this for just over half my life now.

This time, however, one of the friends isn’t here, since he is getting more and more reluctant to leave his house at all and has been since covid. Another isn’t here because he has just been in for an operation to remove a melanoma.

The effects of aging are definitely being quite prominent at the moment.

Oh yes, very much - and not just with movies, but TV, novels, stage performance and the like.

As a kid, it was just the overall visuals and spectacle as much as anything - details of the plot were secondary. Into my teens and early twenties and think that plot details came to dominate and after that exploring interesting concepts began to take priority. Then I guess that I began to appreciate the production side of things more: writing quality and cinematography etc maybe into my 30s and 40s. And these days (in my 50s) I am much more focused on character-driven things.

Fairly standard (for the UK, in the '70s): black trousers, blue or white shirt, dark blue blazer, school tie etc.

BUT, the blazer had the school emblem on, which was derived from the poultry trade that had been a major feature of the town’s prosperity at one time: we all had a large un-ironic turkey embroidered on our chests.